A new beginning.(Britain)

EVER since the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher, political correspondents have been writing about the Tory party as anthropologists might write about primitive tribes, or Gothic novelists about ancestral sins. Matricide, blood-guilt, nemesis, the Furies, betrayal, and self-destruction have been the themes. And the reality they sought to convey was that the Tories, having dispatched a leader to whom they owed more than a decade of power, had thereafter been unable to agree on their attitude toward her corpse (in fact a rather lively one), her philosophical legacy, her successors, or her standing. And that left them unable to agree on anything else--on policies toward Europe, the economy, and taxation, or on who should lead them. They elected two leaders but never gave them united backing. Loyalty--previously said to be the Tories' secret weapon--had been replaced by more or less permanent intrigue by shifting and bitchy factions. And they fell steadily in public esteem as a result.

This unhappy wandering has now come to an end with the election of Michael Howard as Tory leader and so Her Majesty's Leader of the Opposition. Almost alone Howard has been a model of loyalty amid all the betrayals. He stuck with the decent but luckless Iain Duncan Smith to the end. It is as if some mythically noble knight had arrived at a broken and disordered Camelot to restore the old virtues and verities. Which in part explains why Howard was elected by acclamation, all his potential rivals having rallied around him, and why his coronation has been greeted with widespread approval and relief even by commentators usually hostile to the Right.

One of the few advantages of the party's internecine struggles of the past decade is that most of the old internal disputes have now been settled. The Europhiles are a clear and tiny minority, and there are no longer Tories who believe, ...